YEAR
2010
INDUCTED BY
Carole King
CATEGORY
Ahmet Ertegun Award
The dynamic duo topped charts with tight, sophisticated pop songs.
Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich rose to the top of the Brill Building songwriting staff with such hits as “Leader of the Pack,” “Da Do Ron Ron” and “River Deep, Mountain High.”
HALL OF FAME
ESSAY
By Tony Fletcher
Through the 1960s, the songs of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich stood as the epitome of pop.
They eschewed the (relative) social commentary and Broadway arrangements of their fellow married writing couples (Goffin and King, Mann and Weil) for topics that suited their own personalities: deliriously dizzy pronouncements of love, loyalty, lust, and – on those rare occasions when their artists, almost entirely female-fronted, needed a change of tact – loss, too.
The tunes were, typically, similarly upbeat, and none the worse for it. Not only did Barry and Greenwich write some of the most blatantly commercial songs of that decade, but some of the most enduring, too.